Arms Procurement Decision Making Volume I: China, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea and Thailand

The rationale for this SIPRI study was to examine ways in which national arms procurement processes, even though they involve sensitive security issues and complex weapon systems, can become more responsive to the broader objectives of security and public accountability. It is believed that the debate on the need for public accountability of the decision-making processes will contribute to the objectives of arms procurement restraint and, indirectly, to the aims of a stable and durable peace.

It is hoped that an examination of the tension between the public's 'right to know' and the military's interpretation of confidentiality based on an exclusive 'need to know' will provide lessons for other areas of public policy making in which the ruling élite controls and manipulates information. Secrecy, moreover, allows waste, fraud and abuse of power to creep into the policy-making processes.

The project examined arms procurement decision-making processes in six major arms-recipient countries. The criteria for selection included their significance in their respective regions, based on their relative economic potential, size and population; their significance as recipients of conventional arms in the past decade; and the inadequacy of published research on their arms procurement decision-making processes. The study proceeded by organizing workshops and networks of experts in the countries concerned, resulting in 60 research papers on which the six country studies are based. It proved a highly innovative and successful approach for the strengthening of contacts between experts in different countries. The project is funded by the Ford Foundation.

Many other countries could have been included in this study using these criteria. For the second phase of the project, studies are being conducted on Chile, Greece, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa and Taiwan.

Findings: the country studies

Key findings

1. The barriers to developing public accountability norms in national security decision making are reinforced by: (a) societal indifference, which allows the military greater autonomy in security policy making; (b) the inadequacy in a qualitative sense of the information needed to facilitate public-interest oversight of defence policy making, for example, by parliamentary defence committees, statutory audit authorities and think-tanks; and (c) legislative oversight bodies' lack of access to professional expertise and advice.

2. A further constraint on the institutionalization of public accountability norms in national security decision-making processes is the enduring influence of personal relationships. In several of the countries under study, it was found that working relationships centre around factions and groups inspired by using influence rather than institutions and professional organizations. This attitude subordinates public interests to the political priorities of the ruling élite.

3. In national assessments of arms procurement needs, two main approaches are taken. The first is the 'threat scenario' approach, a reactive approach spawned by a need to offset the effects of arms procurement by other countries in the region. In this approach the military perceives arms procurement as a solution to assessed threats, equipment replacement or modernization problems. The second is a comprehensive national security problem-solving approach, which integrates the perspectives of diverse agencies in a coherent manner. This approach places a greater emphasis on exploration of national security alternatives through dialogue between different actors and agencies.

4. Better coordination between the foreign and defence policy-making structures leads to a more balanced examination of alternative approaches to security rather than military capability and deterrence strategies. Structures and processes for coordinating coherent foreign and defence policies are lacking, except in the case of Japan. In other countries this co-ordination is limited to inter-ministerial communication. The shaping of foreign and defence policies in separate arenas leads to bureaucratic tribalism and discourages cross-fertilization of ideas.

5. There are serious gaps in the public understanding of the entire financial burden of arms procurement on society. The R&D community and arms producers often understate weapon system costs in order to obtain approval. Public debate on arms procurement decisions tends to dwell on issues such as threats to national security, the size of the defence budget or the effects of weapon procurement costs in general. This indicates an incomplete understanding of the true ownership costs of weapons over their entire life cycle.

6. The lack of transparency in defence budgeting is often connected to obsolete budget designs, the absence of multi-disciplinary expertise in the national statutory audit organizations, weak constitutional provisions for the provision of information for public scrutiny of decisions, and a typical bureaucratic attitude which prefers confidentiality to accountability.

7. In some newly industrializing countries, the arguments for large public-section investments in order to achieve military industrial self-reliance are questionable in the absence of self-sustaining engineering and technological capabilities in the civilian industrial. Capacities to evaluate and monitor defence R&D and arms procurement decisions are generally weak, with the exceptions of Japan and Israel. Ironically, opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse abound in the defence R&D and industrial sectors, particularly in countries with low levels of public accountability.

Conclusions

• • Except in Japan, formal processes for long-term threat assessment and coordination between foreign and security policy-making processes are not well organized. Coordination between the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the Japan Defense Agency is broadly based and well institutionalized. Although this may not directly influence arms procurement decisions, it reduces the military's autonomy and broadens the rationality of national defence decision making.
  • In Israel, although coordination between the ministries of defence and foreign affairs is at an early stage of development, the Israel Defense Forces' defence plans and arms procurement priorities are closely integrated. In South Korea, coordination of security decision making is transparent, but better developed between the country's military and the USA than between its military and the South Korean Government. In all other countries in this study, coordination between defence and foreign policy is lacking, which may affect the coherence of national security decision making.
  • The influence of the military on national security and arms procurement decisions was found to be high in China, Israel, South Korea and Thailand. In India, despite the healthy state of civil-military relations, the military is somewhat insulated from public accountability norms.
  • The defence budget design and breakdown of the financial data made available determine how informative published budgets are. In the case of China, parliamentary oversight of the defence budget does not exist except insofar as it is part of the general state budget. In all the other countries such oversight is carried out in a perfunctory manner, except in South Korea, where a better budget design to facilitate parliamentary scrutiny is beginning to take shape.
  • Audit, both by the legislature and by professionals, is an essential part of democratic oversight. Departmental audit agencies exist in all the countries, but their levels of competence vary. The study did not identify any statutory audit processes for scrutinizing the arms procurement decisions in China and Thailand. In the case of South Korea, increasing democratization is leading to improvements in statutory audit processes. Israel appears to have the highest standards of multi-disciplinary competence in the Office of the State Comptroller, enabling timely evaluation of arms procurement decisions:
  • In all countries except India and Thailand, the agencies for testing, monitoring and evaluation of R&D are independent of those which carry out R&D. In Israel, Japan and South Korea, where applied R&D is conducted in the private sector, technology testing, validation and evaluation are carried out by agencies of the defence ministries.
  • The existence of competitive engineering industries in Israel, Japan and South Korea gives these countries greater capacity to manage and integrate technologies developed in the defence and the civilian sectors than in India or in Thailand.
  • More often than not, parliamentary opinion on security policies is given low priority by the government and the military, who assume that they know what is best for the security of the country. On the whole, a lack of availability of experts to the legislative oversight processes impedes the creation of capacities for monitoring the government. Legislative oversight is better organized in Israel, despite its military's influence in the national decision-making apparatus owing to the country's strong security concerns.
  • Official information and statements of civilian and military officials in China, India, Japan, South Korea and Thailand are traditionally treated with deference. The defence debate in India and Israel is comparatively more developed.
  • Arms procurement decisions understandably require a certain degree of confidentiality. The elected representatives need to devise criteria and methods to harmonize those valid requirements with their demands for information for the purposes of oversight.
  • The potential contribution of a cadre of inter-disciplinary experts independent of the government in advising legislative oversight bodies in their work in order to create checks and balances on national arms procurement decision making cannot be overemphasized.
  • Public accountability of security policies and arms procurement decisions could also encourage accountability in other aspects of public policy-making.
  • Major arms-recipient countries with relatively transparent public scrutiny methods have a responsibility to show other countries in their respective regions how accountability norms can be developed to encourage balanced national security decision-making and arms procurement decisions.
  • Broader public participation in the national security debate can have a stabilizing influence and can contribute to regional confidence and security building. There is a need to develop regional dialogues to design a code of conduct for arms procurement restraints as a confidence-building initiative.
  • Even in established democracies, military institutions, security bureaucracies and defence industrial organizations tend to emphasize their autonomy in defence decision making by controlling information, and resisting public accountability. Public debate is stifled by promoting the belief that military is the only instrument for advancing national. More often than not, defence decision makers overemphasize the need for secrecy by failing to distinguish between the demands for public accountability and the competing requirements of military confidentiality.